


drowning at the living end

by mickleborger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, Sovereign if you squint i guess, indoctrination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 15:56:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7469802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saren Arterius’s No Good Very Bad Day, pt. 2</p>
            </blockquote>





	drowning at the living end

There are no echoes in this vast empty ship, though its walls curve high above your head; sounds fall flat here like bricks that shatter and scatter onto the ground and never rise again.  Every word you speak is a brick, heavy and bland.  They drop out of your mouth, straight down into a pool of muck that rises ever higher - to your knees, to your waist, to your neck.  You cannot move for the muck made of words you spoke that were not yours.  The muck is up past the top of your fringe and still you speak and still the muck rises and you cannot see yourself and you cannot stop.

 _The walls are red the air is red everything is red_ , red like blood that isn't yours - yours is blue, but someone's is red and it is the red of this air.  It chokes, this blood-red air, enviously as if it were once a thing alive and hated you for still being one.  It chokes and the great walls of the high halls push, and shove, and without moving press in on you from every side; and the muck made of words your mouth hated tingles under your skin, behind your eyes, against the back of your skull.  Deep inside your throat is a scream that cannot get out.   _It cannot get out_.

There is a way out of the muck, there has to be, you have to be somewhere in the muck still.  The muck is in your chest and your eye sockets; it digs itself under your talons and does not budge.  You are in an endless sea of red-red muck and you are too small for it and cannot see the end of it.  There are others in this sea, there have to be.  It is too large to only have you in it.  The others could not see the end, either.

Maybe they thought there was no end?  Even as your treasonous mouth spits out more of its blood-clot bricks you claw upwards, and you feel all around you the expanse that stretches out in all directions, and you do not know which way is up.  You do not stop.   _There is no way up_ , whispers the muck.   _You do not stop._

It is in your throat now and you do now know your own words; you feel covered in sand and filled with sand but still all there is is this muck that slithers and slips.  You cannot beat your hands against it because it has trapped your arms, and still and feverishly you speak.  You want to scream.  You want to scream.   _You want to scream_.

But your brick-shaped words come out softly and fall silently because they already belong to the thing that surrounds you and are only the pulse of this living sea in which you are so small.  You think you are clawing up.  You feel you are falling down.

In these bricks are chips of words that could be yours.  They glitter and their edges are sharp, and sometimes they almost flitter up and cut through the air the way real words do, before the muck swallows them up.  Bright and bitter are the half-words left to you, and small and red in the Council chamber with even smaller people before you ( _but whole, and with their red on the inside_ ) you hold them in your outstretched hands and hope someone will see them--

\-- _Nihlus was a fellow SPECTRE_ \--

\--but the muck is too thick and they disappear into the miserable pool.  The keen inside your larynxes is high and clear and broken in the middle, and it rattles against your teeth, and it throws itself against your ribs, and it tears at your heart like a caged animal; and you feel yourself sliding back with an acrid tide with an unuttered scream roaring at the base of your tongue and _too late, too late, too late_ \--

\-- _and a friend_.


End file.
